YET again all drivers are faced with crippling fuel prices, while the supermarkets do battle over who can drop the fuel price, but only if the driver’s family spends loads of money in the food aisles.

Meanwhile local fuel retailers are squashed by the supposed cheap fuel offers at the conglomerates.

All that is achieved by these actions is that there is localised panic buying by the public who are keen to save 10p and even 15p a litre on the commodity that starts the weekly cycle – the fuel needed by the wage earner to earn the money to shop to buy the food to get the cheap petrol or diesel.

Then there is the actual cost of the shop to get the discount to fill the fuel tank. What goes unnoticed is the odd couple of pence here and the penny there put onto the cost of the basic food bill. Basically there is enough of the penny pinching to claw back all but a few pence of the supposed saving.

Then, as I noticed last year at our supermarket fuel station, the price at the pump goes up just before the offer starts and up a penny here and there through the offer period.

Meanwhile the small petrol retailers have to suffer desertion at their fuel pumps or cut their margin to the bone to keep afloat.

The Office of Fair Trading and the revenue men choose to look away too. After all, the 80p a litre of taxation is too big a gift to rock the boat for.

I saw the other day a very true quote from obviously a private truck owner. I read: “Born free, taxed to death.” How true and to the point it is.

My last point is, if there can be such tempting fuel discounts being banded about, then it seems true to say that the price is artificially high. But with nobody to stand up and rock the boat at Westminster, there is no one to support the consumer who is forced to overspend to try to save a few quid.

MR S W LLOYD, Leominster.